Living in ______ Square Feet

If anyone has ever wondered what it might be like to live in one of the showrooms in IKEA, we can attest that it isn't too bad. We moved into our new apartment on Saturday with a few life lessons learned and a lot of work. We feel somewhat settled and moved in. We have seen nothing but sunshine and beautiful weather since our arrival, which we are continually reminded is not normal for this area. We enjoyed our first visit to International Protestant Church of Brussels as a family.
Monday was Nathan's first day of school and he enjoyed his teacher and classmates very much. He was only there one day before yesterday's holiday, Labour Day. We celebrated with new friends and we all had a wonderful time. The children played together for hours and were exhausted by the time we arrived home again.
Today it was back to work for Daddy and back to school for Nathan. Mommy drove Nathan to school alone for the first time and it went well. Afterwards, Mommy took the girls to the Carrfeour for diapers and a few groceries we were unable to get on our huge shopping trip Monday evening. Mommy even used to bread cutter for fresh bread. We are still waiting for our air shipment and Sarah was down to 2 diapers and very few wipes so a trip to the market was necessary. Unlike in the US, nearly every establishment was closed on Labour Day so we were unable to make any purchases yesterday. Honestly, it was nice to enjoy a holiday with new friends great food. Because we were with all English speaking expats, it was easy to forget we were in another country for the afternoon.
We are experiencing a very large learning curve and at times my brain hurts from all I am trying to absorb. The driving is coming along. We have a teeny, tiny parking space in a teeny, tiny garage here, but I am not comfortable parking there as our mini-van is not teeny or tiny despite its name. We are learning that laundry takes much longer than in the US and cooking shorter--that is cooking time--it still takes me a while to get things started while I am translating the instructions for our IKEA oven/microwave on Google. Until we are more familiar with the stores and products there is no "running in and out" for something. With no air conditioning, we rely on open windows for cool air and there are no screens normally here. The windows in our apartment here open as doors and there is only a small pane of glass between us and the ground three stories down. It really isn't very warm here yet, but we are told that summers are quite warm without a/c. Most Americans return to the US for several weeks so we will be in search of others who are not leaving for the summer.
This afternoon we begin our registration with the commune and hope to take care of a few things before Daddy leaves for Germany in the morning. He will only be gone one night and thankfully we feel more comfortable here with each passing day. We can walk to many shops and parks from our apartment. We are all doing well. It appears that we will not have our US number while living in this apartment so we will not be able to talk much except on Skype. The pictures are of our actual apartment and where we'll be living the next few weeks.